Cutting Through The Crap

Monday, November 14, 2011

Tortured Minds

It's as if Republicans wait for something to be disproved, and then line up like pre-teen girls at a Bieber concert to support it. Really, it's the most amazing thing: there's nothing they say that hasn't been fully debunked at some point or another. Being wrong seems central to their policies on everything. Tax cuts, regulation. Climate change, creationism. If it's been shown false, they grab at it like David Vitter in a diaper store. If it's true, they drop it like a hundred-million year old rock. Or lie about it.

In the (shudder) foreign policy debate, a series of factual eggs were laid. That, of course, is nothing new. But then, nearly to a man (and, it goes without saying, a woman) the R candidates lined up in support of torture. Bring it back, they demand. We loves us some waterboarding.

Never mind that since Obama ended it, we've intercepted more plots, found and blown up (like it or not) more terrorists than Bush in his most fevered dream. Never mind that the purpose of torture has always been -- and, used by tyrants, remains -- the wringing of false confessions from broken captives. Ask John McCain. Never mind the many experts and military leaders who've told us the information gathered from torture is completely unreliable and that the non-torture methods are far superior. Bring back torture, they demand. It's as American as apple ghraib. I'd like to say those proudly uninformed idiots have finally and undeniably embarrassed themselves; but clearly they have no capacity for embarrassment, nor does their audience.

After months and years of listening to their idiocy, words are all but failing me. I'm literally shaking as I type; I should be on the floor curled into a ball. I'm not sure I can take it anymore. What have we become when that grotesquely gaping group of gasp-inducing gaffers is offered up by a once-respectable political party; and when the more outrageously inaccurate or desperately disgusting are their pronouncements, the louder their audience cheers.

These are the purported leaders of a major political party; the people cheering them on are actually part of our political process, have their fingers on the buttons in the booths that will determine our future. Or lack of it. Bullshit pours from them like, well, shit from a bull. Freely, happily, with no thought aforethought, those laughable know-nothings (the one or two who know one or two things feel they have to hide it from their voters) spew demonstrable falsehoods like puke from a bulimic. It's truly awful. These are disgusting people.

Really, Republicans: this lot is the best you can do? Within this gaggle of grotesquery (Huntsman, when he's occasionally not drinking the tea, excepted -- and he was done before he started) is the one you'd choose to lead our country? Really? You'll support the last one slouching, you can do that without shame?

For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™

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About Me

I'm a mostly retired general surgeon. With my surgical blog, my intention is to inform, entertain, and possibly educate the reader about surgery, and about the life and loves of a surgeon: this one, anyway. Don't know what I'm thinking, doing a political blog, too.
In an amazing coincidence, I've also written a book, "Cutting Remarks; Insights and Recollections of a Surgeon." It's about my surgical training in San Francisco in the 1970s, aimed at the lay reader with the goal of entertaining with good stories, informing with understandable details of surgical anatomy, procedures, and diseases. Knowing you, I bet you'd enjoy it. In fact, if you like Surgeonsblog, you'll absolutely love the book!